Inspiration has not been in short supply at this year’s New York Fashion Week. One item on the runway has caused a stir, however, after a designer claimed on Instagram that her dress had been copied by another designer. Native American fashion designer Bethany Yellowtail posted a comparison of a dress she had released last year and a design shown this week by London-based KTZ.

Fans, shocked and saddened by the death of Leonard Nimoy, took to social media on Friday to post tributes to the Star Trek actor and multi-talented artist. Nimoy’s last tweet, “A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP” was published by the 83-year-old actor in the early hours of Monday morning.

US President Barack Obama will visit Selma, Alabama to commemorate the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday”. That’s how historians refer to the violent clash between protestors and police when civil rights activists tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge as part of their walk from Selma to Montgomery to protest for voting rights.

A poster for a Louisiana strawberry festival showing two faceless black children has prompted sharply split online opinion over whether it is offensive and racist. The Ponchatoula Strawberry Festival attracts hundreds of thousands of people to the small city near Lake Pontchartrain every April, and according to organisers is second in popularity in the state only to Mardi Gras itself.

Within 24 hours, as writer Dave Weigel noted, new Daily Show host Trevor Noah went from “progressive icon to villain”. The cause? A social media record that showed Noah cracking jokes that many found in poor taste – and worse, unfunny.

THE 50,000 fans who travelled to Chile’s National Rodeo Championship Finals in late March may have been surprised to see that Michelle Recart had qualified. As an amateur and mother in her late 40s, Ms Recart looked the very antithesis of the typical competitor in what is a famously elitist and chauvinistic sport. But apart from being a woman, Ms Recart was little different from her rivals. Like them, she comes from a wealthy family that has been involved in rodeo for generations. Her father is the former president of the Federation of Chilean Rodeo.

In 1988, after nearly 17 years of a brutal military dictatorship that killed over three thousand and arrested or exiled tens of thousands more, Chile’s military regime, led by General Augusto Pinochet, called a referendum.